Cloud computing is a term that describes delivering computing services and applications as a service hosted on a network such as the Internet, rather than as a product. Cloud computing is an emerging and well accepted technology that will be widely used in the future, especially for business applications. The cloud computing approach offers companies the possibility to significantly reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of business applications by using various computing, storage, and infrastructure and management services in the “cloud.”
Some current legacy business applications are considered on-premise, that is, bound to a company network and where data is stored on local storage systems. Thus, all data is under control of the company, and usually important data is regularly archived and is accessible 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
When switching to cloud based applications, such control and archival processes are no longer necessary. Different cloud services are typically utilized by these applications which results in a distribution of business relevant data. There still exists the need to keep track of data that leaves a company network in order to fulfill legal requirements (archiving, audits, etc.), or to prevent data loss when a particular cloud service goes offline (technical problems, insolvency, etc.). Currently there is no solution to keep track of the distributed stored data, to gather and retrieve business data from remote cloud services and store a company's data in an appropriate format (e.g. XML) in a central repository maintained by the company.